Overview

To simplify access to different repositories, Artifactory allows you to define a virtual repository which is a collection of local, remote and other virtual repositories accessed through a single logical URL.

A virtual repository hides the access details of the underlying repositories letting users work with a single, well-known URL. The underlying participating repositories and their access rules may be changed without requiring any client-side changes.

Page Contents

Basic Settings

In addition, in the Repositories section of the Basic settings screen you select the Available Repositories you want to include in the new virtual repository and move them to the Selected Repositories list.

The Included Repositories section displays the effective list of actual repositories included in this virtual repository. If any of the available repositories you have selected are themselves virtual repositories, then the Included Repositories section will display the local and remote repositories included within them. The Included Repository list is automatically updated in case any of the nested virtual repositories change.

The search/resolution order when requesting artifacts from a virtual repository is always:

Local repositories

Remote repository caches

Remote repositories themselves.

Nesting

Nesting is a unique feature in Artifactory and facilitates more flexibility in using virtual repositories.

You should take care not to create an "infinite loop" of nested repositories. Artifactory analyzes the internal composition of virtual repositories and will issue a warning if the virtual repository can not be resolved due to invalid nesting.

Using Includes and Excludes Patterns

The ability to define and Includes Pattern and an Excludes Pattern for virtual repositories (especially when nesting is used) provides a powerful tool you can use to manage artifact requests in your organization.

For example, your organization may have its own artifacts which are hosted both internally in a local repository, but also in a remote repository. For optimal performance, you would want these artifacts to be accessed from the local repository rather than from the remote one. To enforce this policy, you can define a virtual repository called "remote-repos" which includes the full set of remote repositories accessed by your organization, and then specify an Excludes Pattern with your organization's groupID. in this way, any attempt to access your internal artifact from a remote repository would be rejected.

Consider another example in which you wish to define a virtual repository for your developers, however you wish to keep certain artifacts hidden from them. This could be achieved by defining an Excludes Pattern based on groupId, source or version.

Advanced Settings

Artifactory Requests Can Retrieve Remote Artifacts

An Artifactory instance may request artifacts from a virtual repository in another Artifactory instance. This checkbox specifies whether the virtual repository should search through remote repositories when trying to resolve an artifact requested by another Artifactory instance. For example, you can use this feature when Artifactory is deployed in a mesh (grid) architecture, and you do not want all remote instances of Artifactory to act as proxies for other Artifactory instances.

Maven, Gradle, Ivy and SBT Repositories

In addition to the above checkbox, these repository types offer the following Advanced settings:

Cleanup Repository References in POMs

Public POMs may include direct references to external repositories. If either of the below code samples are present in the POM, Maven dynamically adds an external repository URL to the build which circumvents Artifactory.

Nothing

Key Pair

Pre-defined Repositories

Artifactory comes with a set of pre-defined virtual repositories, which reflect binary management best practices as follows.

remote-repos

Aggregation of all remote repositories

lib-releases

libs-releases-local, ext-releases and remote-repos

plugins-releases

plugins-releases-local, ext-releases and remote-repos

libs-snapshots

libs-snapshots-local, ext-snapshots-local, remote-repos

plugins-snapshots

plugins-snapshots-local, ext-snapshots-local, remote-repos

repo

The default global repository

The Default Global Repository

Artifactory defines a default global virtual repository which effectively aggregates all other repositories at the following URL: <host>:<port>/artifactory/repo.

By configuring Maven with this URL, any request for an artifact will go through Artifactory which will search through all of the local and remote repositories defined in the system.

From v3.2, you can disable Artifactory from creating the Default Global Repository by setting artifactory.repo.global.disabled=true in the Artifactory System Properties.

To control resolution of remote artifacts for other Artifactory instances for the global virtual repository repo, you need to use the artifactory.artifactoryRequestsToGlobalCanRetrieveRemoteArtifacts system property, which is set to false by default.